We Can Fix That with Data

Our latest dev blog talks about our iterative design process here at Spacetime, including an application of a simple data mining system.

How to fix an experience curve: “we went in and, through data mining, determined how long characters ‘lived’ (existed) at any given level. This pointed out exactly where our problem areas were and exactly how we could address them.”

In response to OH MY GOD, WHY DOES THE GROCERY STORE WANT TO KNOW MY NAME, a bit about grocery store loyalty cards.

• WoW talent distribution metrics. Somewhat flawed methodology (he only examines a set of characters with Allakhazam profiles), but interesting nonetheless. 12% balance druids, represent!
• An RMT solution to the Chinese government-mandated anti-addiction system.
• Pictograms and culture. Worth thinking about if you’re planning to localize your game. You can’t bake the word “Blacksmith” into your sign textures. Well, you can if you want to redo all your signage for every version of the game. Good luck with that, and I’ll spend a lot less time a) thinking about universally understood icons, and b) asking the artists to do the textures once and only once.
• Information design is graphic design: improving the usability of information software (via Juice Analytics). MMOs are information-heavy games; we should be working harder to present the players with the information they need in a format they can use. WoW has a decent default interface, but still, how many of the most popular WoW UI mods are ones that improve information display?

Did you know they’re data mining our children?

Just as adware often incorporates spyware, games can also be used to gather various types of user information. Through data-mining, chat analysis and other forms of automated surveillance, player input can be turned into valuable market research data. This can range from statistics on player demographics and in-game activities to more nuanced findings about the ideas and opinions players communicate while gaming or participating in related forums. With advergames, this transformation can also lead to direct and detailed feedback on the effectiveness of particular ads and techniques. The feedback loop between advertiser and player is thereby brought full circle, from market research to reception analysis and back again.

The horror! The author doesn’t say whether or not Neopets and the like use the data to improve gameplay, but who cares? They’re data mining our children!

I hadn’t heard about it before, but California Assemblywoman Lori Saldana’s “new bill making it illegal for companies to embed spyware in their games” sounds a little broad. Will fear of marketers lead to an outright ban of client-side data collection?

I’m not too worried, because as an MMO designer, I don’t care about the client a whole lot — the settings I want to know, like which abilities you have on your hotbar, I like to store on the server anyway. But this could hamper our ability to look at your machine settings — data programmers use to reproduce client crashes and estimate system requirements. And it could hamper our ability to keep games fair.

Does anybody have any more information on the California bill? Should gameplay analysts be worried?

GDC writeup to come. In particular, I have a good rant brewing about this year’s game design challenge. Summary: “can’t you spend two fucking dollars to experiment with what you’re supposed to be designing?”

A reader points out that players have managed to crack open the WoW Armory’s sweet, sweet database — and it’s so obvious. They’re not processing the displayed data, like I said was impossible. They’re using PHP’s built-in XML processing functions, and the Armory makes those XML files available when you ask nicely. Holy shit.

Antiarc’s WoW Armory Guild Tools is extremely slick and open source, so you can see exactly how he did it. Which is very easily.

See also Thrissa’s Signature Generator, which demonstrates that those XML files have more data than the Armory site actually displays. It shows my druid’s leet 117 kills, while the official site won’t show until you have more than 1337.

I’m busy getting caught up at work after GDC and I’m also on a death march to level 58 in WoW, but I hope to have some time to look into the data myself pretty soon.

I was going to post something about rupture.com’s beta, and how slick it is, and how I wonder how popular it’s going to be.

But they got owned.

The social features should be trival enough to add.

More commentary when I can actually, you know, view the site. It’s done nothing but time out. Are they doing anything that SOE didn’t do with eq2players years before?

In the meantime, the official thread is pretty fun. Lots of privacy complaints. Somebody says “excellent, now I can look everybody up before I invite them to a group and see if they’re specced in a way of which I approve.” Man, and I was selling my feral druid as a main healer so well over the last week.